Media, such as video media, is transmitted, both in fixed quantities of data and in streams of data. Because of the size of the data being transmitted, different methods are used to efficiently transmit the data. One method is compressing the data at its source, transmitting the compressed data, and decompressing the compressed data at the receiving end. Data compression is beneficial because it requires less bandwidth, which reduces the cost of transmitting the data and makes the transmission of the data more efficient. On the other hand, compression runs a risk of reducing the quality of the data once it is decompressed. When data is compressed, some of the data may be lost and may not be recovered during decompression.
Within the field of data compression and decompression, different methods exist. One method uses discrete cosine transformation of the source data, followed by a form of linear quantization to compress the data. Once the compressed data is received, it goes through a linear dequantization, followed by an inverse discrete cosine transformation, to become decompressed. Different methods for linear quantization and linear dequantization exist, and each must balance the dilemma between the bandwidth consumed by the compressed data and the quality of the decompressed data at the receiving end.